They say desert only gets one "s"

because you only want to go to the desert once, but you want dessert twice (hence the two "s"). The Atacama, however, is a desert that deserves two "s".

I went there a few weeks ago (sorry for the delay) August 15-18. overall the experience was fantastic I would definitely recommend to anyone heading to northern or central Chile. We left on a Thursday morning out of Viña del Mar. Took an early afternoon flight out of Santiago, landing in Calama. When we arrived I was pleasantly surprised to feel the hot sun on my skin. It was warm enough, for the first time in a while, to wear a short sleeved shirt, without a sweatshirt over it. Once off the plane, we walked confidently on the side of the highway toward the town of Calama where our bus to San Pedro de Atacama would be picking us up. We were just trying to save a couple dollars, but we got to a point where walking no longer seemed like a safe, viable option and that opened up two additional choices. Would we hitchhike or call an Uber? Option B seemed the most likely to help us reach our destination and so we went with it. Especially since the glares from men in their vehicles passing my group of 8 girls did not give us too much confidence in the community around us.

friend erica and I getting ready to hitchhike

When we finally got to Calama, we got some food because the whole lot was pretty hungry. Luckily, as always an empanada hit the spot. We had time to walk around and explore given that our bus wasn't leaving the station in Calama until 8:50 pm. We split up into many groups and enjoyed our free time, grocery shopping for the most part, and meeting back around 8:30 at the bus station. We get there only to discover that our bus line cancelled all trips between this station and San Pedro de Atacama. The bus line that had already sold us tickets, had not let us know ahead of time, and that was the last bus scheduled to go to Atacama for the night, had bailed. All we had to compensate was the few Chilean Pesos that we spent on the fare. We are all resourceful and powerful young women, learning to navigate South America and the world on our own, and as these powerful young women we made it all work out. We worked it out with another busline, one coming from Bolivia, to pay the busdriver under the table, to drop us all off in San Pedro at the bus terminal we were supposed to arrive to. Around 10:30 pm maybe a little bit later we arrived safely at the hostel. The hostile managers were two men from Buenos Aires, Argentina, traveling South America by bicycle, spending a stretch of time in San Pedro to make some money before continuing.

friend erica and her delicious empanada

Our fun started mid-afternoon on Friday. We were scheduled for a tour of Valle de la Luna. We piled into a van in the downtown area of Atacama. From there we started a hop-on hop-off tour of the valle. The Valle has stone and sand formations carved naturally by wind and water. The varieties of colors and textures, make its appearance comparable to the surface of the moon. In this part of the desert visitors can also see lakes dried out such that the salt composition leaves a white covering over the area. There are also saline rock formations that look like man-made sculptures. We travelled to all the main attractions in this part of the desert, by the end of which my bladder got the best of me (as usual) and we had to locate the restrooms, but luckily, the place where our evening was scheduled to end had some. We finished our evening at the Duna Mayor, where we watched the sunset and felt the temperature drop as it naturally does in the desert. I also was curious about the rocks in the desert, and if anyone was wondering they do in fact taste salty.

Day 2 was an early start, and by that I mean I stayed up all night minus a couple hours. Doing what you might ask? The altitude did not mix well with alcohol for one of my friends and I was the best suited for holding back her hair. We were out of the house that day bright and early scheduled to go to a salt flat and some lagunes located at the base of the volcanoes. I'm going to take a chance and say that this was my favorite day in Chile so far because I got to see wild flamingos. It was also great because I got to know the friends I had already made a little better, plus, our bus driver made us breakfast and it was one of the most genuine things I had seen in a while. I also, on this day, got over my fear of outdoor bathroom using. This was necessary due to the lack of bathroom facilities in the Atacama. This skill would come in handy later on in this trip as well. At the latter end of the trip we stopped for lunch at a local spot with delicious food, Chicken Soup, a veggie omelet, rice and salad. At the end another dream of mine came true, seeing real life llamas (not in the wild because llamas are domesticated vicuñas) in their South American homes.

Day three, the last day in San Pedro, was a long one as well, we got back around noon but we had left very very early in the morning, around 4 am. This was such that we could get to the geysers at their most active hour. A windy ride up the mountain, took us to the beautiful spot where the geothermal activity would intrigue us. After observing the smoky geysers, we ate some breakfast, provided by the same generous and warm hearted bus driver, huevos and pan, and moved onto our next adventure: changing into our swimsuits in 30 degree weather and jumping into a hot spring. Ready for some hot-tub level action, jumping in was disappointing, the water was lukewarm and my body was still COLD. I proceeded to get out of the water to change only to be yelled at by a grumpy man (who sounded like he was from Spain) for "stealing his stall". Ok sir, but if it was your stall, why weren't you IN it? Anyway, after that we trekked through a valley of cactuses, and enjoyed a mini waterfall.

The trip home Sunday night to Monday morning was quite tumultuous. Sunday night our bus from Atacama to Calama broke down. In the middle of the desert highway, we stopped, abruptly. The people on the bus were making a commotion because they wanted to get off, the busdriver was nowhere to be found, and they were getting claustrophobic. Luckily a mechanic on board came to our rescue. He got off the bus, fixed what was broken, and we got going. We made it to Calama, stopped for some dinner, and continued to the airport. The airport was the worst of it. We assumed that we would be able to get through security and sleep in the airport gate areas until our early morning flight. That was very naive of us to think of that, and we were NOT let through security. The airport closed down at midnight, and we were left without heat, on the cold tile floors to sleep on until 5am when the airport staff started arriving. After the gate, we were able to get home pretty smoothly, we were reunited with some of our tour group on the plane which was fun. I got home and slept a lot in order to be ready for my 8am class the next day.

'Til next time

<3